things i've learned being a swim teacher.

3 days ago
3 min read

i've been teaching swim lessons for almost three years, but tomorrow is my last day (for now). i've spent over two hundred hours teaching kids, and as i've gotten better at it, i've been observing how they learn. i've had many kids who were super scared, so i've been thinking a lot about fear & bravery. i realized a lot of my observations apply to my daily life. maybe they apply to your life, too.

it’s normal to feel scared, but what are you doing about it? choose to be brave
- break up scary things into small steps
- take risks. persuade yourself that you can do it, because you can
- don’t think, just do: the longer you wait, the harder it seems
keep your end goal in mind. don't let challenges or fear get in the way of your goals. i like to remind my kids about when they had just started lessons and were terrified of doing the simplest thing, but now it’s easy. often we need to take a moment to ask ourselves what we really want out of life, out of specific opportunities, & out of each day. when we've decided, we can look back and remind ourselves how far we have come already. our capabilities and possibilities are much bigger than this one moment in time.
having fun makes hard things easier. sometimes with the hard things in life, we just need to make them a little less serious and choose to be joyful. we want to become good swimmers, but we also want to enjoy swimming. so it is with life, isn't it? we want to become better people, but we also want to have a joyful life. we can choose to be happy while we work to improve.
it’s hard for everyone, so don’t take it personally. some of my students, especially the few older adults i taught, were self-conscious about how slow they were learning or how difficult a simple skill was to master. i tried to remind them that swimming is hard. it's the same with life. if we always blame ourselves for our challenges, we will limit our ability to overcome them. we all have challenges, and sometimes we need to give ourselves grace and patience while we learn.
we all have different strengths and weaknesses. for some kids, swimming on their back is the easiest thing. they float like a cork and they love it. for other kids, i can try every possible trick in my toolbox and nothing makes floating easier. they just sink. maybe it’s because they're tensed up & nervous, maybe it’s their body shape or size, maybe it’s the way they are trying to float, i don’t really know. but that's like life. for some of us, floating is hard. for some, it's easy. we all have our strengths, and we all have our weaknesses. sometimes we just have to dig into our strengths instead of despairing because we can't float. or maybe we need to learn specific strategies for swimming differently on our back. but whatever it is, we really can't compare our weaknesses to the strengths of others, or our strengths to their weaknesses.
if you work at something for a long time & don’t give up, you can surprise yourself by what can happen!! the power of endurance is amazing. if you decide you want to improve, you can. no matter how long it takes, if you keep trying, it will happen. over and over, i’ve watched kids who were shaking from fear become little fish who love the water and don't want to get out. if i had told them that at the start, they would have laughed at me and told me it was never going to happen. they didn't believe they could do it. but i knew they could, and we worked until it happened. it’s the same with us. things we think we could never ever do, we can, if we choose to never give up. anything is possible if you work to make it so.
sometimes we just need to try again later. sometimes now is not the time. maybe we need to grow a little. maybe we need to fix our attitude. maybe we've maxxed our skills for the moment, and we just need to practice and play. sometimes i tell the parents to take a break from swim lessons, because it’s not the right time. and maybe sometimes in our lives we need to take a break from a specific hobby or project, and come back to it later. and that's okay.